On a bed of final glory

When I was a little girl, we lived in a huge five bedroom house on an acre of land. Our neighbor had a plantation house and probably an acre and a half, filled with crumbling gazebos and detached garages with ancient cars. I lived in a magic place, where I could run free and imagine anything, like all the pretend horses that lived in the stable I imagined under the pine trees. And I had an obsession with the neighbor’s garden shed, and I was convinced gnomes lived there.

But this is not the story I’m telling.

When I was a little girl, a neighbor’s cat killed birds in our yard. I have vivid memories of running to my daddy and shouting that there was another dead bird in the yard. They looked so horrible and beautiful at the same time. A mangled corpse, but all the feathers spread on the ground, more stunning in death than in life, laying like an exotic fan. I was simultaneously fascinated and repulsed.

My father thought dead birds too grim for a little girl, and I was not allowed to watch him dispose of the body. He would pick up a shovel, serious-faced, and march to the dead bird. “No, you can’t come Christine.” (It was always “Christine” when the moment was serious, though I ardently went by “Chris” as a child.) Daddy earnestly marched the dead bird to the garbage can, conveyed by a shovel and laid to rest on a bed of refuse.

I never went to the garbage can to look, which is weird because it seems like something I would have done. Instead, I looked at the feathers that were left on the ground and thought of the sacrifice the bird made for a last glorious beauty.

(Written in response to this.)